AIMÉ

The whole of Wednesday, Jean-Pierre lingered with Aimé in the dark, making very little noise. Most of the time, Aimé rested with his head on a pillow in Jean-Pierre’s lap, and Jean-Pierre pressed on certain parts of his head. The pain didn’t disappear, but after a while of Jean-Pierre working on him, the pain did fade somewhat, and he could almost forget it until he had to get up to piss, and the nausea came back very strongly.

It was funny, watching Jean-Pierre.

He didn’t look concerned, didn’t look super worried, but as soon as Aimé asked him for anything – another blanket, to get him a drink or something to eat, to read to him, to shut the curtains more, he was up in a heartbeat.

It was still a migraine – apparently, and it wasn’t that Aimé didn’t believe him, but he didn’t much like the idea, either – but there was something intoxicating about having Jean-Pierre’s full attention, about having Jean-Pierre blow everything off to take care of him.

He sent a doctor’s note into Aimé’s lecturer on Thursday for two days, and although Aimé felt better on Friday, more than well enough to go in again, with the pain and the photosensitivity gone, Jean-Pierre insisted he stay home and relax himself, that he not go in and put any undue strain on his head.

Colm had left to work on the allotment earlier that morning, and Aimé had watched as he’d stacked up sufficient empty crates to take along – he had a lot of stuff that was ready to pull up and donate around the place, and he’d said to Jean about bringing vegetables home for the week.

Aimé was wrapped in a duvet on the bed, sitting cross-legged with a book in his lap. He’d been reading all day.

Jean had asked him if there were any particular books he’d wanted to read, and he’d gone downstairs to pick the book he’d wanted out of Aimé’s backpack. When Aimé had made an absent-minded complaint about having to look up Foucault on a PDF, Jean-Pierre had blinked at him, and asked if he minded reading Foucault in the original instead of in translation, and when Aimé had quoted things at him, he’d been able to find the right place in his books.

They were covered all over in annotations, Jean-Pierre’s books – Aimé had noticed that he had a lot of them, that most of them were about liberal philosophy and social theory, the ones that weren’t about history, but he’d never seen him read anything except for his medical texts.

Every page he looked at, paging through a yellowed, decades-old copy of Histoire de la folie, the monograph printed on its own and fastened haphazardly together with metal clips older than Aimé’s parents, was annotated in French and Latin, in Jean-Pierre’s handwriting, but there was other handwriting too – Aimé couldn’t read Farsi or Arabic, but he recognised Asmodeus’ neat, perfect handwriting, and there was a square, tiny script on some of the pages in English – Farhad’s handwriting, Aimé thought, because the same ink showed in what must have been Farsi beside some of Asmodeus’ annotations.

“You write on all your books like this?” Aimé asked, and Jean-Pierre glanced at him from where he was sat at his desk, typing rapidly. He’d been quiet all day, and yesterday too – he’d been focusing on Aimé, but Aimé was aware that he was tender, was pretty sure that the bad dreams had been continuing this week.

“Most of them,” Jean-Pierre said, giving him a small smile. “Most of the books I own, I have read many times, and studied them for speeches, for my own essays. But that monograph, and some of the others, Asmodeus would obtain editions for me as he travelled and read them, annotate them, before he sent them to me.”

“That’s the Arabic, right?”

“His style of writing has remained largely unchanged since the seventh century, if certain of my siblings are to be believed,” Jean-Pierre murmured, his lips shifting into a small, fond smile. “My brother is a traditionalist.”

Traditional sounded about right for Asmodeus – he never looked at a TV, didn’t own a phone or a computer, and even now, although he was travelling wherever, Colm and Jean-Pierre had no idea where he was unless he called them from someone else’s phone. The uncertainty of it didn’t seem to bother Colm and Jean-Pierre, but it bothered Aimé, a little.

It hadn’t occurred to him that he’d really miss De, when he left, but he did.

“He like Foucault?”

Jean-Pierre laughed, showing his teeth. He was beautiful like this – he wasn’t trying to be beautiful, was dressed in a pair of Aimé’s pyjama bottoms and one of Colm’s jumpers, and his hair was tied up with a ribbon in a loose, messy bun. He always wore ribbons in his hair, like he’d never heard of a hair band. Now, he was slouching back slightly in his seat, one arm curled loosely back over the chair.

“It is not always easy to tell,” Jean-Pierre said. “He has parodied Foucault significantly in our conversations, if I ever do quote him in a speech or similar. But you know him to be greatly concerned with liberty, in one way or another.”

Earlier, when Aimé had asked him, Jean-Pierre had walked to the corner shop for him and bought him some biscuits just because Aimé had asked if they had any left, hadn’t even hesitated, hadn’t even thought about it, had just asked what brand Aimé wanted and put on his coat.

It had been—

Sweet, yeah, definitely sweet. Unexpected.

Jean-Pierre kept jumping to do anything Aimé asked for, ran to make him more coffee, get him the books he wanted, more blankets, turn down the heat. Aimé had barely lifted a finger since his migraine had hit.

It felt unbelievable, somehow, dream-like.

“Jean,” Aimé said.

Jean-Pierre turned around from his laptop. “Ouais?”

“Would you, uh… Would you make me something for lunch?”

Jean-Pierre smiled at him: it was a soft, warm beam, gentle, indulgent, and immediately Jean-Pierre was on his feet, putting his slippers on. “You would like more coffee also?”

“Do you mind?”

“Not at all,” Jean-Pierre said, leaning and cupping Aimé’s cheek, pressing their lips together, and Aimé watched him as he stepped out of the room, and then looked back at the monograph in his lap.

*     *     *

COLM

Colm kept the big pumpkins carefully balanced on top of the crate as he brought them into the house, keeping the crate balanced on one hip as he tipped the pumpkins onto the sofa.

He’d smelled the bacon and eggs frying as he came into the house, and it was a surprise when he saw Jean-Pierre at the hob with a spatula in his hands instead of Aimé.

Jean-Pierre had a plate on the counter, and Colm could see the bread sitting next to the toaster, could see that Jean was frying tomato as well as the bacon and eggs, and Colm curved one arm around his brother’s shoulder, standing up on his tip-toes to kiss his temple.

“You want me to do that?” he asked. “I know you don’t like the smell.”

“I can do it,” Jean-Pierre said. “Would you put the toast in for me please?”

Upstairs, Aimé was reading – Colm was aware of the familiar concentrated air that exuded from him when he was focused, the way he buried himself in one of his books. Colm had never been a big one for reading himself – it wasn’t that he couldn’t, but he found it hard to concentrate on words on a page, and he preferred TV, and preferred talking to that.

He put the bread in the toaster, turning it up to where he knew Aimé liked it – almost burnt – and took the lid off the butter dish to let it melt a little more.

“You want to tell me why you’re at his beck and call just ‘cause he had a migraine?” Colm asked, beginning to pull vegetables out of the crate and pack them into their places in the pantry, and the fridge, where everything had a dedicated drawer and a neat little label in Asmodeus’ handwriting. He liked having everything in its place, even when he wasn’t here to see it. “He was sick the other night – he was okay by yesterday evening. Today? He’s fine. He could’ve come out to the allotment with me today – would’ve been good for him.”

“He can later in the week,” Jean-Pierre said, flipping over the bacon. “I want to take care of him.”

“Why?”

“Because… he does not believe that I will,” Jean-Pierre said, after thinking about it for a moment. Colm took this in. Jean-Pierre didn’t feel like he was being weird or nefarious about anything, and he didn’t at all feel annoyed about what he was doing – there were the familiar feelings, disgust at the smell of the meat and the eggs cooking, fascination with the shiny colour on the egg yolk, but no irritation at having to prepare them, no frustration with Aimé.

Colm wished Asmodeus was here.

He liked Aimé, was growing to like him more and more, but it was difficult to follow exactly what Jean-Pierre was doing with him, sometimes – and right now, it seemed like Aimé was almost okay with it.

“And will you?” Colm asked. “In two weeks? In a month?”

Jean-Pierre considered the question very carefully as he plucked the toast out of the toaster, beginning to butter it absentmindedly. He was normally shit at buttering bread, all his surgeon’s dexterity going right out of the window so that the knife went through the bread, but Aimé liked it so fucking black and burnt that it was a little too hard for the knife to go through anyway. The two of them were made for each other, if you looked at it like that.

Colm picked up the bubbling cafetiere, which they never usually used when Asmodeus was out, and poured coffee for Aimé, setting it on the tray with his plate.

“You think I will become bored with him?” Jean-Pierre asked, looking at Colm thoughtfully, expectantly. “I have never grown bored with a lover before. You think Aimé is different to the others?”

He did not seem angry about it, nor uncomfortable. He wasn’t embarrassed about it either, or defensive: he was curious, and he asked the question like he trusted Colm’s expectation of his future behaviour more than his own.

“Not asking if you’ll get bored of having him,” Colm said slowly, watching the way Jean-Pierre cleanly chopped the toast into pieces, arranging it on the plate with the eggs, the bacon, the tomato. “Asking if you’ll get bored of taking care of him.”

“I’m a doctor,” said Jean. “I’ve been taking care of people all my life.”

“You’re obfuscating the point.”

Jean-Pierre drew a symbol on the edge of the plate, and Colm closed his eyes as it flared with the enchantment before dimming again. Nothing complicated – a simple warming charm. Jean-Pierre kept his lips pressed together, looking forward instead of at Colm.

When he spoke, it was measured, considered, pensive: “It is not, precisely, about taking care of him. It is not that he wants, that he needs, to be taken care of – he is self-sufficient in his way. Dysfunctional, yes, but you see how living with us has aided that dysfunction – even in his own apartment now he cooks, he cleans, he sorts his glass and metal for the recyclage. He does not need for me to coddle him. But he needs to believe that I will.”

“Why does he need to believe that if you won’t?”

“I will.”

Colm arched an eyebrow, unable to contain his scepticism. “Always?”

“It doesn’t need to be always,” Jean-Pierre said insistently – not aggressively, not like he was pissed off, but like he was frustrated that Colm wasn’t understanding the point. “But this week, yes. To him it is proof that I love him – he needs it.”

“Huh,” Colm said slowly. “Interesting.”

“That I care for my lover?”

“No,” Colm said. “That you understand why he needs it.”

Jean-Pierre wrinkled his nose, pressing his lips together so that they thinned dramatically, and then he said, in a low, quiet voice, “You are always so willing to believe that I have no feelings whatsoever. You’ve killed as many people as I have – you think it has tainted me?”

“Coming from a guy who turns his own feelings off.”

“Not my feelings,” Jean-Pierre said sharply. “Other people’s. You may choose to delve ever and always into the hearts of strangers as you please, but there is no reason I should do the same.”

“You used to,” Colm reminded him. He wished he could say he regretted it, but he didn’t – he and Jean traded barbs from time to time, and they did it on purpose, with knowledge of what the result would be.

Jean-Pierre went stiff, and he picked up Aimé’s plate.

“I like him, you know,” Colm said. “Aimé. We all do.”

“He’s a tremendous prick,” said Jean, not without affection.

“Yeah,” Colm said. “Birds of a feather and all that.”

Jean-Pierre’s stiffness faded enough that he smiled, and Colm watched him as he stepped away to go back upstairs with Aimé’s tray.

As he fried himself a full Irish for himself – with sausages and beans as well as the tomatoes – he cut a fruit tray up for Jean, and it was ready for him when he came down an hour later for his own lunch.

Jean-Pierre leaned on his shoulder when he saw what he’d done, wrapped his arms loosely around his waist and pressed his cheek against Colm’s upper arm. Upstairs, Colm was dimly aware that the shower was running, and although he hadn’t mentioned it to Jean, he was thinking about grooming Jean-Pierre’s wings.

Colm felt himself smile even as he leaned and pressed a kiss to the top of Jean’s head. “You still having those nightmares?” Colm asked, despite knowing the answer.

“No,” Jean lied, despite knowing that he knew. He’d been half-dozing as Aimé had eaten, not long enough to have a really deep dream, but long enough to have one – and a bad enough one that Aimé himself had noticed.

They hadn’t been quite so bad this week, but Colm had noticed Jean-Pierre shaky over it in the mornings, and he’d woken up once on Wednesday night with a sudden flare of panic from his room, but as he’d lain there, feeling for Jean, he’d felt Jean-Pierre ground himself in the dark of the room, curling himself more about Aimé, soothing himself.

“You dreamt about Rupert, the other week,” Colm said. “Now you’re dreaming about prison. You think that means something?”

Jean-Pierre didn’t want to talk about this at all, but he especially didn’t want to talk about it with Colm: he could see the way Jean’s hands clenched into fists at his sides, feel the bitterness, the anger, that radiated from him, still blaming Colm three quarters of a century later. “Dreams are the machinations of our minds, doing their best to problem solve while we sleep,” Jean-Pierre mumbled. “I don’t think it any deeper than that.”

“That idiot really loves you, you know.”

“Yes,” Jean-Pierre said, his expression screwing up. “That’s the point.”

Colm shook his head. “Pumpkins are ready when you are,” he murmured, and smiled to himself as Jean-Pierre sidled away.

*     *     *

JEAN-PIERRE

He was in a low mood when he came back upstairs, even having eaten, but it made him smile to see Aimé naked, sitting on a towel, with a book in his hands, which were dry, although the rest of him glistened with moisture.

He hadn’t meant to fall asleep earlier – he’d taken a break from studying to sit on the bed with Aimé and pick a little at his tomatoes, which didn’t taste like bacon grease because he’d cooked them in another pan, and he’d laid his head on the pillow beside Aimé, leaning his forehead against Aimé’s upper arm.

He’d only meant to rest his eyes for a little while – he hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and he’d jolted suddenly awake with a shock when Aimé had got up from the bed to put his plate aside. How Aimé had flinched, too, putting out his hands and hushing him like a spooked horse, saying, “Hey, ange, it’s just me,” so gently.

“This is signed,” Aimé said, holding up the book. Jean-Pierre glanced to the wall, at the gap between his edition of La Légende des siècles and volume the second of Les Misérables.

“You think autographs are a novel premise?” he asked, and Aimé released a low, amused sound.

“He calls you,” he said, tapping one fingernail against the title page, where messy handwriting was scrawled all over, a far longer inscription than Jean-Pierre had needed or asked for, “sublime.”

“I’m sure he said a great many pleasant things about me,” Jean-Pierre said. “His signature graces several of the volumes I have attributable to him – and several more besides.”

“Jean,” Aimé said.

“Aimé,” said Jean.

There was a bright smile on Aimé’s closed lips, and a sort of sparkle in his eyes. “Did you sleep with Victor Hugo?”

“Wouldn’t you have?” Jean-Pierre asked, and Aimé fell back on the bed and laughed. Jean-Pierre gently took the book from his hand, setting it aside, and then he climbed on top of Aimé, straddling his thighs and looking down at him, feeling the weight of Aimé’s hands come to rest on his hips.

“Any of the characters based on you?” Aimé asked. “Ange-olras?”

“Do you think you’re funny?” Jean-Pierre asked, even as he felt the smile tug at his lips. “If so, it falls to me to tell you you have been misinformed.”

“Sorry I woke you up earlier,” Aimé said quietly, his voice sober as he slid one of his hands up underneath Jean-Pierre’s blouse and his jumper, his fingers playing over Jean-Pierre’s belly. His hands moved smoothly over the scars there – some time ago, he was almost frightened to touch them.

“I have been having unpleasant dreams,” Jean-Pierre said quietly.

“What about?”

“My once-gaoler.”

“Colm said you were in prison in the forties.”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“Attempted murder,” Jean-Pierre said quietly. “Attempted regicide.”

“You go back and kill him after?” Aimé asked, and Jean-Pierre chuckled, leaning in and pressing their noses together, letting his fingers creep slowly up Aimé’s face, spidering through his stubble toward his hairline.

“No,” he murmured. “He yet lives.”

“Anyone I’d have the trading card for?”

“I don’t know what that is, but it was Pendragon.”

“Pendr—” Aimé suddenly sat up, almost dislodging Jean-Pierre from his lap, although he looped his hands around the base of Jean-Pierre’s back to keep him from falling off the bed. “Pendragon? Arthur Pendragon? You tried to kill King Arthur? Jean, he’s in a fucking coma.”

“You would think that would make him an easier target,” Jean-Pierre said with a moue on his face, preferring this baffled outrage to discussing his actual sentence, and Aimé let out a powerless laugh, reaching up to cup Jean-Pierre’s cheek.

“You’re fucking crazy,” Aimé said softly, with a reverence that made Jean-Pierre feel warm. “You know that? Who put you in jail? Merlin?”

“Myrddin,” Jean corrected his pronunciation, but he did not hide his displeasure, and Aimé became graver once again, looking at Jean-Pierre’s face, his thumb stroking gently over his cheek.

“Let me have a look at your wings,” Aimé said gently. “See if I can’t make you relax a little.”

“Will you fuck me?”

“Have I ever said no to fucking you?”

“Yes,” Jean-Pierre said, and Aimé gave him a sceptical look.

“No,” he said. “I haven’t.”

“You’ve fallen asleep,” Jean-Pierre pointed out.

“After fucking you to my own exhaustion? I’m sure I fucking have.” Jean-Pierre smiled, leaning back in Aimé’s lap and stroking his fingers over Aimé’s chest hair, saying nothing, until Aimé said, “What, you want my permission to fuck yourself on me when I’m sleeping, too? I was under the impression you’d do whatever you wanted with me. I think I even told you that you could fuck me to sleep.”

“Perhaps,” Jean-Pierre said, without shame. “But permission is nice to have. Have I permission to fuck you awake, too? Permission, perhaps, to play with you when I have no intention to wake you at all?”

Aimé’s expression was frozen for barely a moment, his terror a blooming flower, before he said, smooth as butter, “It’s yours.” It was funny, in that – it was the hesitation that made the moment so delightful, that made Jean-Pierre thrill, and he grabbed Aimé by the hair to pull him into a kiss.

*     *     *

AIMÉ

Pumpkin carving was even more difficult than he had expected, but also more relaxing than he would ever have believed. Sitting at the kitchen table, one of Colm’s sharpened knives had slid through the top of the pumpkin’s flesh easily, and he’d managed to pry off the lid he’d made, setting it aside.

There was a catharsis in pulling the flesh out from the inside of the pumpkin – it felt fucking disgusting, wet, squelching and cool under his fingers, but he could put his fingers through the orange web on the inside and tear it out from its roots, dropping it aside into the bowl.

Jean-Pierre didn’t.

Colm had said Jean-Pierre carved his own pumpkins and that he wasn’t interested in doing it, which Aimé believed, but like the princess he was, he had looked to Colm and pouted at his lips and said he didn’t want to touch the insides of the pumpkin, and although he had scowled about it, Colm was neatly scraping the flesh out of the inside of the squash for him anyway, and had orange staining up to his elbows.

“Shut the fuck up,” Colm said.

“I didn’t say anything,” said Aimé.

“Like you needed to.”

“You’re not doing it neatly enough,” Jean-Pierre said, looking over Colm’s shoulder. “Look, you’re scraping the side, but you’re not taking it all off.” Colm, very slowly, a murderous look on his face, turned to look up at his brother.

Aimé started laughing, and Colm threw a handful of pumpkin guts at him, which Aimé dodged so that it spattered against the counter side behind him instead.

“Colm—”

“Do you want to do it?”

“No.”

“Then ta gueule, Jean.”

Jean-Pierre pressed his lips together, his arms crossing over his chest, and then he settled on the back of the sofa again, watching Colm very critically.

“How is it, Jean,” Aimé asked, scraping one of the big spoons up the inside of the pumpkin and trying to drag out the last of the roots of the pumpkin guts, smoothing out the inside of orange flesh, “that you’re okay sticking your pretty little hands into a human’s guts, but putting your hands in a pumpkin’s is too much for you?”

“I never did surgery on corpses,” Jean-Pierre said. “They were never cold when I touched them.”

“How would it not be worse if it was warm?” Aimé asked, and Colm sniggered, leaning forward to scrape the inside of the pumpkin out.

He turned the pumpkin around, then, showing the bowl to Jean-Pierre, who gave a little nod of approval and mumbled a thanks as Colm moved into his own chair, beginning to sort through the pumpkin guts, tugging the little seeds out from the rest of the mess and dropping them into a separate bowl.

“How did you do that so fast?” Aimé asked, and Colm leaned over to look into Aimé’s pumpkin, which was still messy with gutted webbing.

“Practice,” Colm said. “You’re doing good.”

For all he’d protested about it, now that Jean-Pierre’s pumpkin had been gutted, he worked quickly with it – Aimé had some edible chalk to mark his sketch on the pumpkin, but Jean-Pierre drew an enchanted one with his fingers, and he used a set of carving knives to work with, quickly stripping away thin strips of flesh away from the pumpkin and laying them on a plate.

“Shouldn’t you like this more than he does?” Aime asked as he sketched out his silhouette. “Didn’t this start in Ireland?”

“Scotland too,” Colm murmured, every pumpkin seed making a wet click as it fell into the bowl with the rest. “Cornwall, I think, Somerset. We never did it in my village, but I think as a tradition it might have started later. I don’t mind gutting the pumpkins out – it needs to be done anyway so we can eat them. But I couldn’t do what you two are doing now, carve them – I could maybe do a grin with teeth or something, but not anything better than that.”

“I assume De is good at it,” Aimé said.

“De is good at everything,” Jean-Pierre said serenely.

Aimé didn’t know quite what to make of his mood – he’d cheered up earlier, after Aimé had finished grooming his wings, and the sex had helped too, but he was still quieter than Aimé was used to. He didn’t look all that tired, and he was smiling, but he just seemed… into himself, somehow, like he wasn’t quite with everything else going on.

It was a relief to see him focus his attention on the pumpkin, but even still…

“Are we going to get trick-or-treaters?” Aimé asked.

“It’s D4,” Colm said. “Probably. We won’t be here – we’re going to a Halloween party in the city centre. Doros invited us.”

“Doros,” Aimé said. “He’s the one Jean locked out by accident once because the wards thought he was a bird.”

Jean-Pierre sniggered. “He is a very old angel. He has been romantically engaged since he Fell with Aetos Talaria.”

Colm glanced at him, frowning. “Didn’t Aetos buy him off Polymetis?”

“To hear him tell it,” Jean-Pierre said, almost inside his pumpkin with his scalpel in hand, so that his voice was muffled, “he was wooing his buyer from within the cage.”

“Am I supposed to know who these people are?” Aimé asked.

“Hermes and Hephaestus,” Colm said.

“You’re inviting me to a party with fucking gods in attendance?”

“The fucking gods will be at better parties,” said Colm. “We’ll mostly have the bitchy ones.”

“Ha,” Aimé said without enthusiasm, and Colm laughed. He knew that there were Hellnistics about, obviously – his dad had been involved with some of them, he knew, for business, and he’d bought wine from Mr Zagre’s stores, but Aimé had never met any of them. He’d heard a lot of them were seven feet tall.

“Aetos isn’t,” said Colm.

“Stop doing that,” Aimé said, and they went back to their work, the three of them sitting around the table. It was weird to think of – Aimé wondered if this was what the two of them were used to, back in the 1700s or whenever else, no computers, no music, just tools and vegetables.

It was—

It wasn’t boring. He didn’t know if he would call it nice, per se: his hands weren’t used to working with these tools and his wrists ached a little from trying to scrape and drag at the inside of the pumpkin, and the work was surprisingly involved. He was tired – not in a huge way, but there was a genuine fatigue from the work, and it was satisfying, even though his hands were sticky with pumpkin juice.

He liked it.

He really did.

His design wasn’t turning out exactly how he wanted, and he pressed his lips loosely together as he wiped away some of the unneeded chalk, frowning at the face and trying to think about how he’d fixed it, and then he looked to Jean, who had turned his pumpkin around.

They’d been working for an hour or so, and Jean-Pierre had been working the whole time – Aimé was surprised to see how little he’d actually done.

He’d only carved out thin slivers of pumpkin around the edges of a scarecrow on a hill, showing the shape of the sack and its straw-stuffed hands suspended on a cross, but it was subtle work – he could almost make out the individual fibres of straw stuck out of the scarecrow’s sleeves, and Jean must have used one of the thin carving tools to make the scarecrow’s face.

“Huh,” Aimé said.

Jean-Pierre’s face fell, and he looked at Aimé, his lips parting. “You dislike it?”

“No, no, it’s good, it’s really good,” Aimé said. “I just thought it was a bigger design.”

Jean-Pierre leaned forward, following his gaze and looking at the front of the pumpkin, and then he blinked. “Oh,” he said. “Let me show you.” When the pumpkin burst with light from the inside, shining brightly, Aimé’s jaw dropped, and he stared at the work Jean had done, fascinated.

He’d done it by carving from the inside, it seemed to Aimé, so that the pumpkin flesh was thinner in some places than in others, and it was extraordinarily subtle: there was a perfect circle around the scarecrow and the hill its cross was settled on, and around it Jean-Pierre had carved bat after bat around the scarecrow in a cloud of flapping wings.

“Wow,” he said. “How the fuck did you do that?”

Jean-Pierre’s cheeks turned pink, and he smiled, pleased with the praise. It was funny, how shy he sometimes got when you complimented him – he liked to be complimented, but he acted so much like he wasn’t expecting it, sometimes, even when he was.

“Show me yours,” Jean-Pierre said, and Aimé hesitated for a second, but then turned the pumpkin around.

Aimé was a good artist. He wasn’t all that precise – there was a reason he preferred to work with oils than pencil and ink – but he was good. Working with pumpkin wasn’t exactly the same as working with canvases, though, and the silhouette he’d carved was clumsy – the young man with the flag in his hand had a bun, and Aimé had carved out his eyes, but they were too large for his face, and too angular, and the nose was barely there at all.

“Who is it?” Jean-Pierre asked.

Aimé sighed.

Colm pointed at the figure’s wings. “It’s obviously meant to be you, you idiot.”

“But he made me ugly,” Jean-Pierre said, and he said it so plaintively, looking so quietly distraught, that Aimé put his face in his hands, groaning and shaking his head even as he laughed.

“It’s hard,” Aimé said, and then he put his chin on his hands, looking at Jean. He should have been offended, he supposed, that the prissy bitch across the table from him was insulting his art, but he was right – it didn’t look how he wanted it, and for some reason, he felt affectionate rather than annoyed. “I don’t know how to do what you do.”

“You carve it,” Jean-Pierre said simply, “until the light shows through as you like it.”

“I grasped that bit, yeah.”

Jean-Pierre stood to his feet, and he moved around the table, looking expectantly for Aimé to lean back in his seat, which Aimé did, letting the angel sink down to perch on his knee.

“I almost do not wish to show you,” Jean-Pierre said softly, meeting Aimé’s gaze from under his pretty blond eyelashes. “Once I teach you, you will soon be better at it than me.”

“Well, I don’t have to carve next year,” Aimé said, physically fighting the urge to roll his eyes: his lips twisted in the urge to smile, to laugh, and he was surprised by how genuinely amused he was, how cute it seemed, when Jean-Pierre was being fucking unbearable. “I’ll let you do it.”

“No, I have to,” Jean-Pierre said. “Because once I teach you, you can depict me more accurately.”

Aimé laughed so hard the chair shook underneath them, and he wrapped his arms around the angel’s middle even though Jean fussed at Aimé getting pumpkin juice on his shirtfront, no matter that he was wearing an apron, and had been since he got Colm to carve out the guts for him.

“What?” Jean demanded petulantly as Aimé wheezed, wiping some of the wetness out of the corner of his eyes. “What is so funny?”

“Oh, Jean,” Aimé murmured, burying his face against the side of Jean’s shoulder. “I never knew Narcissus had such a hard time choosing between his reflection in the mirror or the water.”

Colm choked on his tea, and that just made Aimé start laughing again, laughing so hard his ribs hurt and his diaphragm ached, and when he finally managed to ease off, Jean-Pierre was looking down at him not with anger writ on his face, but with a tiny little smile tugging at his lips and a furious blush burning in his cheeks, his eyes shining.

“You going to kill me in my sleep for this one?” Aimé asked.

“I would never do that,” Jean told him gravely. “I would meet your eye as I killed you, and tell you why I was doing it.”

Cold terror ran down his spine, and at the same time, Aimé’s libido – which had been pretty exhausted a few hours ago – flared hopefully back to life.

“Ugh,” Colm said, and walked outside.

“Why don’t we start with the pumpkin?” Aimé suggested breathlessly, and Jean-Pierre began by putting his scalpel gently in Aimé’s hand, and showing him precisely how to hold it.